Asking for Financial Help Isn’t a Red Flag for Creative Agencies. It’s a Strategy.
By Hannah Foster
Conor Firth built Art First Business Services around a gap so obvious it is surprising nobody filled it sooner.
Most creative founders know they need help with their finances. What they rarely know is which kind of help they actually need, and the distinction turns out to matter more than most of them expect.
Conor Firth has spent years on both sides of that confusion. Before founding Art First Business Services, he served as CFO across mid-sized advertising agencies operating in multiple countries, and before that built a career in the art world, running galleries and launching one of the first e-commerce platforms for contemporary art. That combination of creative fluency and financial discipline is the foundation of what AFBS does: provide bookkeeping, CFO-level advisory, and tax accounting exclusively to creative businesses, under one roof, from people who understand how those businesses actually work.
The simplest version of what separates those three services, Firth explains, comes down to time: “A bookkeeper records what happened, a CFO helps the business understand what might happen, and an accountant, in the context of a creative business, mostly files the year-end taxes.”
Each function is necessary. But most small creative businesses either conflate them or skip two of the three, defaulting to whoever does their tax return and assuming that covers everything else.
What is actually under the hood
When Firth starts working with a new creative business, the first month rarely looks the same twice. For a startup, there is often nothing to inherit: no accounts, no structure, no chart of accounts. He builds from scratch. For an established agency, the picture is usually messier in a different way.
What he typically finds is a financial setup that does not reflect how the business actually operates: incorrect classification of transactions, no project-level tracking, and a set of accounts built for a generic business rather than the specific rhythms of a creative one. Month one is largely forensic. Getting the numbers clean and correctly categorised across each client scope is the foundation everything else is built on. From there the conversation shifts quickly to strategy: how work is being priced, how contractor relationships are structured, what the tax implications of current spending look like, and where the margins are actually going.
That last question tends to produce the most immediate impact, particularly when a small agency is negotiating with a large corporate client.
The procurement problem
It is a situation most independent creative agencies will encounter eventually. They win a significant client, either through a pitch or through a relationship that has outlasted its original agency home. A number gets shared early in the conversation. Then comes the procurement team.
“Procurement don’t care one cent about your margin,” Firth says. “So never mention it.”
The mechanics of what follows are predictable once you have seen them enough times. A detailed scope of work is requested, with resources, rates, and hours broken out granularly. Procurement teams, whose purpose is to reduce what the client pays, work from that breakdown to identify what they consider excess. Some focus on individual rates. Others fix on the total cost of a deliverable and negotiate from comparable projects to drive the number down. The standard target, Firth notes, is a reduction of at least 20 percent.
Without someone in the room who understands both how the work gets made and what it costs to make it, that reduction tends to land on margin. The fees that looked healthy at the start of the conversation quietly disappear by the time the contract is signed.
The defense is not aggressive negotiation. It is preparation: knowing the numbers before walking in, understanding which costs are fixed and which have room, and being able to build a credible case for the fee structure rather than simply defending a number. That is the kind of support most creative agencies have never had access to before.
What financial help actually costs
There is a perception in the creative industry that bringing in outside financial support signals distress. Firth pushes back on this directly.
“Bringing in financial help shouldn’t signal that something is wrong with the business,” he says. “It should signal that something is right with the business.”
The argument is straightforward. A CFO who negotiates on both sides of the ledger, pushing back on client fee reductions while also questioning contractor and vendor costs, typically recovers more than the cost of the engagement. The work happens behind the scenes and is often underappreciated internally because it is invisible by nature. Nobody sends a congratulatory message for the contract that came in 15 percent better than it might have without intervention.
The same logic applies to the accountant relationship. The question Firth thinks every creative founder should be asking their accountant is a simple one: how well do you actually know my business? An accountant working from a profit and loss statement built on incorrectly classified transactions is working from an incomplete picture. The advice that comes out of that process is only as good as the data going in.
At Art First Business Services, the three functions sit together intentionally. The bookkeeper, the CFO advisor, and the tax accountant all work from the same understanding of the business, which means the advice at each level is connected rather than siloed. For a small creative agency navigating its first major corporate client, its first significant hire, or its first year of serious revenue, that continuity tends to be the thing that makes the difference.
Firth’s longer-term vision for AFBS is to build a team of advisors who share his background: people who have worked inside creative businesses, understand how they are structured, and can speak to founders in a language that actually lands. The goal is not to become a generalist firm. It is to remain the option built specifically for this industry, and to be the name that comes up first when a creative founder finally asks the question they should have asked earlier.
